Loss of key staff

Have you just received the bad news that one of your most valuable employees isn’t coming back to work?

While no one is indispensible in business, losing people with essential skills or years of knowledge and experience can be extremely damaging.

It can create a hole in your business, a hole through which profits and cash flow can quickly drain away, a hole that’s difficult to plug.

Losing a key member of staff could be enough to tip a business that’s struggling to survive into one that’s facing insolvency.

You can’t predict loss of key employees

If you’re a shrewd manager of people, you’ll have a good idea of when staff might want to make a career move out of your business.

But that’s only one reason for a key employee leaving you at short notice. You can’t foretell when someone may fall ill, be involved in an accident, or suffer a change in their personal circumstances which has a serious impact on their employment.

Nor can you anticipate the full impact of someone’s departure. If a key employee goes to, or becomes, a competitor, you could suddenly be faced with tougher trading conditions. Losing them could also have consequences for your relationships with some of your customers and suppliers.

Act now to minimise damage

Whatever the reason for losing someone, the first action is to assess how much harm it could do to your business.

Consider the effect on income and costs. Are some deals or contracts put at risk? Will you need to incur extra costs by hiring in short-term replacements? Will there be recruitment costs? If the loss is likely to be temporary, due to illness, what impact will that have?

Feed this information into your profit and cash flow forecasts as soon as possible, to identify vulnerabilities. Be realistic, not optimistic, in your assessment. Experience suggests that circumstances rarely work out as positively as we hope. The earlier you can predict a cash flow problem, the more time you have to find a way out.

Don’t let loss of key staff bring your business down

If you’re worried about how your firm will survive the loss of a key employee, why not give the Business Recovery team a call right now?

Our experts have helped hundreds of business owners find the right solution to their cash flow problems.

Don’t let the loss of an important member of your team endanger your entire business. Call Business Recovery now to find out how we can help.